Sixteen years after the Exxon Valdez spill, the Alaskans most affected by the spill haven't seen one cent of a $5 billion settlement.

Shortly after the catastrophic 1989 Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Exxon sent Don Cornett, the company's top official in Alaska at the time, to the fishing port of Cordova to reassure the fishers that the company would make things right.

"You have my word," Cornett told them then. "I said it, Don Cornett. We will do whatever it takes to keep you whole. We do business straight."

No one in Cordova's Masonic Lodge tonight, where attorney Brian O'Neill has called a town meeting, has forgotten that promise, and no one has failed to notice that things haven't exactly worked out that way. O'Neill, a lawyer with the Minneapolis firm Faegre & Benson and the head of the legal team on this case, has, for ten years, returned to Cordova regularly to update his clients on the progress of the civil case against Exxon.

At this meeting, a man walks in late. He pours himself a cup of coffee and stands back near the kitchen, listening to his neighbors talk about how they now consider their wives' health insurance plans dowries and how the new definition of a high-liner is a fisherman whose wife has a good job. He listens to as much as he seems able, then turns to O'Neill and says, "Where in the hell is my money? That's what I want to focus on. If any of us knew we'd be having this meeting fourteen years later, we'd have liquidated and moved out. Maybe we should have." The man's name is Phil Lian, and in 1988 he was one of the most successful fishers and businessmen in Cordova, fishing the Sound and selling supplies to Cordova's fleet. His business was growing at 80 percent a year, and grossing two million dollars a year. But after the spill, no one needed supplies because no one was going fishing. Today, his empty fishing supply superstore, across the road from the Cordova Fisherman's Memorial, is a Dickensian symbol of loss and matters left unresolved.

"I don't like to call it anger," Lian says sharply. "I like to call it frustration."

"Well hell, I'm angry!" O'Neill shouts.

The story of Cordova is not just a sad tale of a few bad fishing seasons. It is the story of how corporations that are, in the words of Brian O'Neill, "nation-states unto themselves", can use the legal system and the seeming apathy of the federal government to bring an entire town to its knees through endless litigation funded by bottomless resources. Cordova, a beautiful but gritty fishing port of 2600, was once a town of high-liners, a term reserved for the most successful commercial fishers, men and women who might have brought in a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, if not more. Today, people in Cordova will tell you there isn't a single fisher in town who would be considered a high-liner by pre-spill standards. Once an exuberant, successful port town filled with old families and big money, Cordova is now a depressed small town where former high-liners mend nets in cannery warehouses and bartenders fill and re-fill beer glasses. If the herring fishery had been closed one, maybe even two seasons, fishers say, they might have been able to bounce back; but there hasn't been a herring season for more than ten years. It has also been ten years since a federal jury awarded the fishers and Natives on the Sound $5.2 billion in punitive damages from Exxon. And it has been ten years that not a single check from that award has been cut. Yet the story of Cordova is not important simply because of the details of the Exxon case; what is at stake in this unprecedented litigation are the concept of corporate responsibility and the way the U.S. legal system can be used by large companies to avoid it.

“The system has failed them”

On March 24th, 1989, Captain Joseph Hazelwood, who had been treated for alcoholism, stepped onto the oil tanker Exxon Valdez having consumed, according to him, three vodkas on the rocks at various bars in the port city of Valdez. O'Neill, however, filed affidavits from bartenders claiming the captain drank the equivalent of five doubles, or, in the words of the Court of Appeals, enough to make most people unconscious. The spill eventually spread down 1200 miles of coastline.

The environmental damage was catastrophic. Cleanup crews watched in horror as otters scratched out their own eyes to rid them of oil. U.S. Department of Justice teams recovered the carcasses of more than 36,000 migratory birds and a thousand sea otters, and believe these numbers represent only a fraction of the actual numbers.

For a few months after the Exxon Valdez leaked eleven million gallons of oil into the Sound, the disaster was imprinted on the national consciousness. But as time passed, it was reduced to a few stubborn media images: an oiled otter, a tar-covered seagull, men in haz-mat suits spraying boulders with boiling water. An out-of-work commercial fisherman was never among the emblems. And now, fifteen years have passed since the disaster, fifteen years during which the fishers of Cordova have been trying -- and failing -- to survive the spill.

"They are very different and very wonderful," O'Neill says of his clients, nearly all of them Sound fishers or Alaska native Indians. "They're good people, people who are comfortable moving off the grid." But fifteen years off the grid has taken its toll in Cordova-and on O'Neill. "They see me as part of a system that's failed them."

Brian O'Neill pulls up to an old warehouse on Cordova's Cannery Row. Upstairs, two redheaded brothers are mending nets: Robbie and Mike Maxwell. As local kids, fishing was the only thing they'd ever wanted to do; when they got older, they raised families on the good money they made during the season. Nowadays they still fish, but don't make a living of it, so repair nets during the off-season.

It can even be reward. The Alaska Daily News reported that Exxon's delays are paying off handsomely. While awaiting a final judicial decision, Exxon has earned enough in interest alone to pay the initial five billion award.

"Each year Exxon delays payment of its obligation," the National Association of Attorneys General wrote in a 1999 letter to Exxon CEO Lee Raymond, "it earns an estimated $400 million from the difference between the statutory interest rate on judgments of 6 percent and the company's internal rate of return of about 14 percent."

When Exxon and Mobil presented its merger proposal to the Federal Trade Commission in 1999, many saw an opportunity for the federal government to put pressure on Exxon to pay the punitive fine. Yet few in Washington -- and no one from Alaska's Congressional delegation -- publicly pressured Exxon to settle while the FTC reviewed the proposed merger. Senator Slade Gordon, a Republican from Washington, was one of the few in the Capitol to oppose approval. "We have an opportunity to make an indelible impression on what would be the largest corporation on Earth," Gordon said in 1999, "that an oil spill like this must never happen again. The FTC approved the Exxon/Mobil merger in November of 1999.

From Dick Thornburgh's retreat from his early censures of Exxon immediately after the spill to the interminable delays in federal courts -- specifically the Ninth Circuit, which has vacated the original award of five billion -- to the FTC's approval of the Exxon/Mobil merger, fishers in Cordova have felt betrayed by Washington.

"The best I can do," O'Neill says, "is to get the five billion. I can't put the Sound back together."

"I would just love to collect the Exxon oil that is on our beaches," Mike says, "and dump those gallons of oil on the front yard of its corporate headquarters. It's been in my front yard for fourteen years."

One of the grimmest aspects of the spill's effect on Cordova has been the state of commercial fishing permits, once highly coveted. On the Sound, a permit is like a home -- it is fisher's greatest investment, something that stays in the family, an asset that accrues value. In 1988, there were fishers in Cordova whose permits were worth nearly a million dollars. Today, their permits -- fishers often call them their "nest eggs" -- have depreciated in value by a staggering 90%. Dr. Steven Picou, a professor of sociology from the University of South Alabama, has spent the last fifteen years studying the effect the Exxon spill has had on the towns of the Sound, specifically Cordova. Over the years, his focus has slowly shifted from the effects of the environmental devastation on the fishermen to the sociological and psychological damage inflicted by the unmitigated legal battle.

Dr. Picou's findings in Cordova were damning: a third of fishers were clinically depressed; approximately 37 percent exhibited symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Sixty percent of Cordova commercial fishers have had to take second jobs to make ends meet. Toxins, Picou was finding, had contaminated more than just the water; they had contaminated the town of Cordova, and this time, Exxon didn't share the blame alone -- it was working in collusion with the U.S. government.

"I think the vast majority of people in Cordova believed the reps from Exxon," Picou said. "But once the issue transformed from how-to-get-out-of-the-media-limelight to how-to-get-in-a-position-to- protect-our-profit-margin-and-stock-value, then it changed overnight. They zipped up their purse strings, got out of town, and said: you'll find us in the courtroom."

In a keynote address presented at the Earth Charter Summit in 2002, Picou outlined what he considered Exxon's legal strategy for avoiding payment of the punitive damage decision.

"Hire the best attorneys money can buy, and aggressively attack plaintiffs in every manner possible, while also delaying court proceedings by any legal means necessary for as long as possible, no matter how frivolous the challenge. Hire your own scientists to evaluate ecological damages and pervert the process of science by hiding behind any degree of uncertainty that may and will always characterize independent scientific damage assessments." In other words, Picou believes that litigation in the cases of big business versus communities devastated by "collateral damage" provide those corporations a kind of insurance policy against future disasters, a policy underwritten by the U.S. court system.

Spills as a cost of business

The Exxon civil case began in 1990, when hundreds of fishers and natives filed lawsuits against Exxon. That same year, attorneys for Exxon filed motions to dismiss the charges in the federal government's five-count criminal indictment resulting from the spill. Perhaps the most memorable brief from this first round was the one in which Exxon claimed that crude oil was not a pollutant under the federal Clean Water Act, which it had violated.

"The crude oil on board the Exxon Valdez was not a waste," Exxon Shipping attorney Edward Bruce said. "It was a commodity." The next year, discovery in the Valdez case began, and O'Neill and his firm, Minneapolis-based Faegre & Benson, consolidated the individual lawsuits. By the time the discovery phase was over, the case file would contain fourteen million documents, more than a thousand depositions, and 618 separate written opinions.

In March of 1991, the State of Alaska, the U.S. Justice Department, and Exxon brokered a deal that would allow Exxon to plead guilty to four misdemeanor environmental crimes, put $100 million on the table for criminal penalties, and pay $900 million in civil damages. By this time, Exxon had already spent nearly two billion dollars in its cleanup efforts. However, environmentalists and legislative critics condemned the deal, complaining that the Department of Justice had backpedaled from its earlier censures of Exxon; the criminal case had been initiated by then U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, who indicted Exxon and promised the federal government was "throwing the environmental book" at the oil company. Thornburgh had initially promised to seek more than six times the amount he settled for from Exxon. On April 24th, 1991, Federal Judge Russel Holland rejected the deal.

"These fines send the wrong message, and suggest that spills are a cost of business that can be absorbed," he said.